Scripting News - Latest Comments in How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

Nice Sharing — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:52:10 -0000

Also check out http://www.nicesharing.com which allows you to combine several URLs into a single short URL. It’s really useful if you want to add background music to a Picasaweb or Flickr slideshow. Or just see 2 sites together with a single URL.

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

Alif Rachmawadi — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:34:32 -0000

After you set up your own Andrew... Like Dave said.. now think how to keep it alive for a long time... ;)

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

Yaniv Golan — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 06:55:30 -0000

Oh, I agree re existing domain names being short enough and the value to the reader - that was my point, I guess it wasn't clear enough.

Re 3rd party tracking, yes, the value is the ego boost, and also the ability to understand how something spreads across the net and who are the real influencers. For companies like http://tra.cx this is invaluable information. It could be provided by the conversational media (e.g. Twitter) or by the publishing infrastructure (e.g. Wordpress).

And of course, once we have multiple stat-providers, there will be companies that will create services that will aggregate all these stats in one place, creating a new industry segment, and so the cycle continues...

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

samj — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 04:50:15 -0000

Domains are usually short enough to be used as is (e.g. http://dell.com/az93 or http://microsoft.com/win7) and the result is clearly a much higher quality link that tells the reader something about the content before they click.

Regarding 3rd party tracking, what is the use case really (beyond feeding the egos of people whos egos don't need feeding). I realise that there are marketing benefits for the few of us who are in that industry but the cost of creating millions of links to each resource (rather than one or two - the canonical and short links) are many and not always obvious. I found today that browsing a twitter search for new content was almost impossible for example because my browser's colouring of visited links was broken.

Incidentally Wordpress blog software will be including shortening services (perhaps using wp.me) in its stats module soon... these will presumably capture stats as well, thus solving the problem.

Sam

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

Yaniv Golan — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 04:41:15 -0000

Good point. Using the same domain name will improve performance, and reduce use confusion. It will also fix the incentives - the folks with the most incentive to keep links from rotting are the content publishers. See http://yaniv.golan.name/blo....

We'll be losing the "tracking" aspect of the current 3rd party short URLs, but this tracking is already quite unreliable given the non-unique nature of the short URLs. Perhaps it would be in the interest of Twitter etc to provide this click tracking capability. It'd still be unreliable, but would be far less damaging to the net infrastructure.

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

Drew Kime — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 12:51:27 -0000

Now that's actually a good reason for them. That's not what I see more often, not by a long shot, but it probably should be.

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

josephzitt — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 08:47:19 -0000

I use URL shorteners for giving people links offline. It's especially handy with tr.im's ability to name the links yourself: writing (to give a fake example) "tr.im/joezittsbook" on a bar napkin is a lot easier and less prone to human error than writing 'www.josephzitt.com/foo/bar/..."

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

Andrew Korf — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:38:09 -0000

on URL shorteners - make your own: http://lifehacker.com/53352...

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

kentl — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 08:02:07 -0000

One problem with any of these solutions is that the short URL often becomes quite long. If I have a site withareallylongdomainname.com and have s.withareallylongdomainname... then that's pretty long too. To solve this case I would have to register another, shorter, domain name and use it instead for my short URL's. The domain name doesn't even have to be that long for the user to want another one for short URL's, as long as the "short" URL is longer than what current URL-shortening services offer we'll have a disadvantage right there. If a lot of web citizens have to register another domain name and administer some extra technology for URL shortening then there will be more dependencies to make each link work, which might cause link reliability issues. On top of that I don't think it will take off if it's complex to the average user.

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

ryanh — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:56:48 -0000

Does twitter really need the 140 limit anymore? Everybody I know that uses twitter either uses twitter.com or a smartphone app, and so for these people the limit is mostly an inconvenience.

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

fauxjebus — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:16:42 -0000

Couldn't this whole issue be solved by using hyperlinks?

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

johnmaher — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:42:27 -0000

"URL-shorteners centralize linking, and make it more fragile, and more controllable....It must be possible for the user to own and control the domain his or her URLs live at...I would be happy to write a howto that explains."

That would be a really good idea. Then each of us could have our own software that shortens our URLs and those we send along, reduce the unnecessary centralization, and provide smaller URLS that can fit within the Twitter parameters. There are URL shorteners out there--mostly in the internet marketing arena--and I think they have much broader use than they're currently getting. Of course, we ARE a lazy species...

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

Andrew Grant — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:31:14 -0000

Your suggestion that setting this up is achievable by anyone who can create an Amazon account is a little ridiculous. The fact that you offered to write a "how to" is clear evidence of this, I don't think anyone has ever done that for creating an Amazon account :)

Any solution that requires people to perform local backups to preserve integrity of shortlinks is a non-starter. Any solution that requires people to do more than type in a url and hit a button to get started is a non-starter.

There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people out there generating short urls every day. Most of them don't give a fig whether tr.im or bit.ly ceases to exist in six months, nor spend 15-30 minutes fooling with DNS/CNAME/S3. To have any hope of being worthwhile any solution that is developed needs to recognize this.

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

mckoss — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:37:09 -0000

The CNAME part of this solution is fine - I was mainly complaining about the fact that users would have to create and manage an S3 account, and that the redirection method breaks down (no 301's).

So if one of the mainstream (or other) shorteners would allow me to use a private CNAME record when creating links, and would allow me to export my data - problem solved (in the "right" way).

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

mckoss — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:27:25 -0000

Hi Tony - I wrote a blog post about this: http://blog.go2.me/2009/01/...

In brief - I'd say to primary motivation is tracking/analytics when you are sharing links to sites that are not your own. Another reason I didn't list there, are that you are adding "features" to your link:

Adding Real-time Discussions - http://go2.me
Adding an element of fun and personalization to your link - http://www.quip-art.com

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

lilbyrdie — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:46:35 -0000

This was the main problem I saw with this solution, actually. But here's the catch:

Regular Joe user wants to create a short link. Site YYY.com, seeing the light of the short URL future, has shortlinks for all of their stories via ZZ.com/xxx. They control YYY.com and ZZ.com, so can keep ZZ.com up as long as they want. This is great and something Company YYY is providing for all their users. I suspect this is actually the use case Dave envisions, but _every single site has to implement it_ -- that won't happen.

Tech savvy Jane user wants to create a short link. Site RRR.com is old fashioned and only has one set of URLs: extraordinarily long ones. Jane creates JJ.com (using the above method) and creates links to RRR.com. These are Jane's links and these links will work so long as Jane wants. This helps Jane as she can grow her own brand, track how her own links spread, etc, but hurts RRR.com when Jane closes down JJ.com. Jane doesn't care, though. This is not so great, overall, but Jane would prefer this.

Real world users are stuck with link rot at some point. But as Louis Gray pointed out in a recent Google Reader comment, very, very few old links are clicked on.

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

Joe Moreno — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:13:05 -0000

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you wrote, but URL name is portable. You have full control of the bucket to copy, backup, etc.
The next step is to make the URL data portable, which isn't hard - we'd just need to standardize it between URL shorteners.

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

Joe Moreno — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:08:44 -0000

It's not just the shortening, but also being able to track traffic stats.
See earlier comment addressing this exact subject in this thread.

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

Tony Wright — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:28:53 -0000

Other than SMS (where it makes sense to selectively shorten URLs) can you explain to me why we want URL shorteners at all? In other words-- if I don't use SMS (I don't), why should I _ever_ see a shortened URL? Who does it benefit?

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

mckoss — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:58:32 -0000

I understand the motivation, but don't like the solution very much. The problem is not so much that a third party is providing the redirection service, as it is that the redirection data and URL name are not portable. This can be solved w/o the technical deficiencies of this S3 hack.

[Does anyone else find it ironic that we're using a 3RD PARTY COMMENTING SERVICE to discuss how to reduce reliance on 3rd party link shorteners?]

- URL Shorteners should provide either a feed or batch backup solution to export data to another link redirection service.
- Accept CNAME redirections as google does with their ghs.google.com service. Users could then register domains that they control and own (and can point them elsewhere if the service expires).

It would be far better to standardize on an export format and data/domain portability, than it would be for individual users owning and managing these kludgey S3 buckets.

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

vrypan — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:14:53 -0000

I don't think that the short domain should be controlled by the creator of short URLs, but instead by the owner of the (destination) long domain.

That's because the person that's mostly interested in keeping a short URL alive and functional is the owner of the domain it points to. This is how my solution http://urlborg.com/a/urlbor... works. And it's nice, because "regular" users don't have to bother with such things: when the user urlborg.com, the generated short URL will be using a custom short domain, if the owner of the destination URL has registered one.

my $.02

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

Henri Asseily — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:32:34 -0000

Hypothetically, technically the simplest, fastest and most effective redirection would be something straight in the DNS.
Let's say there's a new httpr:// and httpsr:// (for http(s) redirection) URI. The browser would take that domain, do a NAPTR query that would return one (or multiple) new URLs that it would follow.
It's just like sip, ENUM, etc... but takes a url and turns it into another url.
So httpr://3tjf.me.com would get the browser to do a DNS NAPTR call to 3tjf.me.com which would return the new url, and it would follow that.

Anyway, this is all extremely hypothetical for many obvious reasons... :) (including the lack of tracking offsetting the gain in speed and reliability)

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

dave — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:30:26 -0000

To your #1 -- back up the data locally. If S3 goes away, move the data to
your Apache server and remap the CNAME. The data moves easily.

Don't know about your #2 and #3 except come on -- getting an S3 account is
as easy as getting an Amazon account, and that's not a huge barrier. If
you're worried about the people who can't get on Amazon, okay -- got it.

And you just need a sub-domain.

Nonsense names? That has not been a problem so far in URL-shorteners. :-)

Dave

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

dave — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:30:13 -0000

Actually I think I got that part of it wrong.

You map the CNAME to the URL-shortener. Later, if they go away or you decide
to leave them, you point the CNAME to the Amazon bucket.

Then you don't need to change the API. And I think we need to see some
convergence there. Since I've built on the tr.im API, and since it's going
open source, that seems the most logical to me. I imagine that bit.ly, the
800-pound gorilla won't see it that way.

Dave

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

micahwittman — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:54:19 -0000

The shared S3 bucket with adjix solution is already working nicely! I wrote it up briefly on friendfeed http://go.wittman.org/3tjf . Needless to say, great post, Dave, and the ensuing discussion.